Queering Agatha Christie

Beschreibung

This book is the first fully theorized queer reading of a Golden Age British crime writer. Agatha Christie was the most commercially successful novelist of the twentieth century, and her fiction remains popular. She created such memorable characters as Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple, and has become synonymous with a nostalgic, conservative tradition of crime fiction. J.C. Bernthal reads Christie through the lens of queer theory, uncovering a playful, alert, and subversive social commentary. After considering Christie’s emergence in a commercial market hostile to her sex, in Queering Agatha Christie Bernthal explores homophobic stereotypes, gender performativity, queer children, and masquerade in key texts published between 1920 and 1952. Christie engaged with debates around human identity in a unique historical period affected by two world wars. The final chapter considers twenty-first century Poirot and Marple adaptations, with visible LGBT characters, and poses the question: might the books be queerer?
This book is the first fully theorized queer reading of a Golden Age British crime writer. Agatha Christie was the most commercially successful novelist of the twentieth century, and her fiction remains popular. She created such memorable characters as Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple, and has become synonymous with a nostalgic, conservative tradition of crime fiction. J.C. Bernthal reads Christie through the lens of queer theory, uncovering a playful, alert, and subversive social commentary. After considering Christie’s emergence in a commercial market hostile to her sex, in Queering Agatha Christie Bernthal explores homophobic stereotypes, gender performativity, queer children, and masquerade in key texts published between 1920 and 1952. Christie engaged with debates around human identity in a unique historical period affected by two world wars. The final chapter considers twenty-first century Poirot and Marple adaptations, with visible LGBT characters, and poses the question: might the books be queerer?
Offers the first book-length queer reading of Christie's work Expands queer notions of archive and canonicity Considers Christie’s reputation in the twenty-first century by exploring nostalgic television adaptations of her work

Autor*in

J.C Bernthal

Themen in »Queering Agatha Christie«

popular crime fiction Detective Fiction popular literature queer studies Gender Sexuality homosexuality Murder Mystery Television and FIlm post-war detective fiction gender performativity gender parody gender constructs societal norms Hercule Poirot

Stimmen zu »Queering Agatha Christie«

“Queering Agatha Christie is the latest of many works subjecting Christie’s considerable œuvre to new readings. … this volume is a timely, rich, immensely suggestive, and … wonderfully well-written reassessment of Agatha Christie and her work.” (Alyce von Rothkirchi, Modern Language Review, Vol. 112, October, 2017)

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